It's a SMALLHOLDING World After All

Yesterday I accidentally put my finger in a dead duck’s asshole.

…Wait, let me start over.

So I’m on my second three-week WWOOF thing. I’m staying with Dan and Rebecca Hillman, a (mostly) English couple, and their two young daughters Aoife (age 7, pronounced EE-fuh) and Muireann (age 5, pronounced MYRRH-in). They call their place Sallygardens Smallholding, named after a traditional Irish song. I knew I was getting into something good the night I arrived. I unpacked my stuff – into the guest room of the Hillmans’ house, rather than in a separate caravan – and came downstairs to find that some friends of the family had come to visit. This consisted of a bald and extremely Irish guitarist named Johnny, his Kiwi wife(?) Arlene, and their(?) ten- or eleven-year-old son Christopher. Wonderful people, all, as I learned throughout the evening. Shortly after they arrived, dinner reached the table: succulent roast pork (raised and butchered by the Hillmans) with drippings-based gravy, roast new potatoes, boiled sugar snap peas, and caramelized carrots (all grown in their garden), accompanied by homemade elderflower wine. Superb!

After dinner wrapped up, we all got out our instruments: my uke, Dan’s accordion, Rebecca’s fiddle, and Johnny’s guitar. We had a rollicking jam session all night and the wine continued to flow. Songs ranged from Irish trad to Leonard Cohen to The Police to MGMT. (Hallelujah is really much less impressive without fingerpicking, and fingerpicking chords doesn’t work great on a uke, I’ve learned.) Fantastic. Oh, and when I mentioned that my SLR broke, Rebecca offered me one of hers that she’d been planning to get rid of on Freecycle. Did I mention this was a really awesome introductory night?

The next day I got up bright and early and began my work. The Hillmans showed me how to feed all the animals (consisting of two ducks, four hens, a rooster, a dog named Moose, three cats, scads of bunnies, a fleet of goats and kids, and two horses), then we all set about to harvesting garlic and weeding the polytunnel. Later in the evening the whole family (and me) went out to gather elderflowers for a new batch of wine. It was surprisingly nice to have my hosts working alongside me instead of just setting me in a particular direction and letting me do things alone. That, plus living in the house, and that I’m their first WWOOFer this summer, makes me feel more like a guest and less like an employee. It’s…very reassuring. That night, Rebecca and I went to a nearby pub to watch a trad session featuring her fiddle instructor, Mossy (that’s probably spelled wrong), who looks shockingly like myself.

The next day I went about feeding the animals, then Dan and I did some winemaking and seedling transplanting. After lunch, it was time to slaughter the six extra ducks that I didn’t mention earlier because I was straight-away informed that we’d be killing them and I wouldn’t need to worry about feeding them. Now, I’ve never seen an animal killed in person, and I didn’t know how I would handle it. Would I be motivated to become a vegetarian? Would I just think it was icky? Turns out it’s a bit disturbing, but really not that bad. One at a time, I would help Dan catch a duck, which he would soothe and gently tie down to a stump before cleaving off the head. Post-head removal, the legs were held while blood squirted (surprisingly neatly) onto a tarp and the body flapped for a bit. I’m told that chickens are impossible to hold at this point because their wings are so powerful, which results in the body flapping itself all over the ground nearby and the blood being ejected in an all-covering mist. Ew.

Well, long story short, I’m totally comfortable eating meat, having watched all this. Glad to have that off my chest! After the slaughtering (we only did three that day) we hung them from apple trees in the backyard and plucked them. I want you all to realize, when you buy organic farm-raised poultry, how goddamn difficult and time-consuming plucking is. I don’t know if there are machines that are available to most people, but MAN. Also it was a little creepy when, at one point, I applied a bit of pressure to my duck and its lungs wheezed. But no worries. After we did the best we could, we singed off the remaining down fuzz with the stove burner (the blowtorch was out of gas). I got to cleave off the feet, wings, and necks! I learned that cleavers are awesome and frightening, and bones make a rather sickening crunch when they’re split. Dan threw them in the fridge to gut them the next day because we’d spent the entire afternoon plucking. Then we returned to the aforementioned pub for a rather adorable kids’ trad session featuring, among others, Aoife and Muireann.

On Saturday Dan gutted the ducks while I watched, on account of I’m not expected to work weekends. Then we went to the Roscommon Fleadh (pronounced FLAH) and saw – yes! – even more Irish trad. I wonder if I’ll be completely sick of the stuff by the time I leave here.

Anyway, it’s totally great, and I’ll keep you all up-to-date, since they’ve got WiFi that I can use at my leisure (when not working)!

Also, while I’m thinking about it, I’ve realized that terrible things happen to celebrities while I’m on vacation. When I was hanging out with the Duhaimes last summer, we lost Issac Hayes and Bernie Mac. Since I’ve left for this particular holiday, we’ve lost David Carradine, Dom DeLuise, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, BILLY MAYS, and Michael Jackson – at the very least! I haven’t been keeping up with other celebrity deaths. I think Bob Hope died while I was on vacation as well; I seem to remember hearing a memorial thing on the radio in an unfamiliar grocery store.